Keep the swamp; throw out the land

I know Louisiana has traditionally been relegated to last or second to last in most polls comparing us to other states. Worst highway system, worst diets, worst politics, worst education, most daiquiri shops, worst gumbo (OK, that one’s not true). But I bet you didn’t know that more than 200 years ago, there was opposition to the United States even acquiring the Louisiana Territory.

If he had cared to, our third president, Thomas Jefferson, could have read criticisms from newspapers in every major city of his decision to purchase the Louisiana Territory. Even though the land purchased extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border and eventually would comprise more than a dozen states, the purchase was highly controversial, and most cities had competing newspapers. For every compliment, there was a criticism.

In Boston, the Independent Chronicle headlined the story “LOUISIANA CEDED TO THE UNITED STATES!” The Columbian Centinel called the territory “a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians.” (Now that wasn’t true at all. We had muskrats, wild pigs, mosquitoes and deer here too.)

The Norristown (Pennsylvania) Herald wrote that if Louisiana ever became a state (or a number of states) that the south would have such political clout “that the northern states can never afterwards maintain any considerable consequence in the general government.”

Why all the controversy over the purchase of some of the richest farm land on the continent? Politics, of course.

In 1802, Spain returned the territory to France, and states no longer could send trade goods through New Orleans duty-free. For the East and North, this had little consequence. For the South and West, the impact on trade would be disastrous. Suddenly, the possibility of war seemed imminent, and journals in those two regions tended to echo those sentiments.

Jefferson knew how much was at stake. In a letter dated April 18, 1802, the president informed the American minister to France of the significance he ascribed to the area: “There is on the globe one single sport, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its [the West] fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce, and contain more than half of our inhabitants. France, placing herself in that door, assumes to us the attitude of defiance. The day that France takes possession of New Orleans … we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”

In an attempt to avoid war, Jefferson sought to purchase New Orleans. In need of money, Napoleon offered the entire Louisiana Territory. Jefferson agreed, and a vast territory that would eventually become 12 states became U. S. property. Most newspaper editors found it difficult not to support the acquisition of more than one million square acres of real estate.

Two examples:

• The National Intelligencer wrote: “[B]y the cession of Louisiana, we shall preserve peace, and acquire a territory of great extent, fertility, and local important.”

• The Aurora, a newspaper that usually supported everything Jeffersonian, wrote “[T]his vast acquisition will every day unfold new advantages to the United States” such as “the prosperity and stability of the union, its internal security, its exemption from suspicious or treacherous neighbors, as an object of great importance in regard to the political influence of nations, as a check upon intrigues with the savage tribes …”

One other thing it did, it clearly cemented the idea of “Manifest Destiny” as it applied to one country from coast to coast. I’d like to see another state top that. Even Texas.